


Only Rock-N-Roll

by ProtoNeoRomantic



Category: You Me & Them
Genre: 99.44 percent Canon Compliant, Ancient History, Angst and Humor, Awkward Conversations, Awkward relationship histories, Blackouts, Canon Dialogue, Classical References, Coincidences, Cross-Generation Relationship, Did you sleep with my mum?, Drunk Sex, Emotions, Episode: s01e02 Three Dinners, F/M, Family Dinners, Fluffy Ending, Keepsakes, Love, Maturity, Memories, Memory Loss, No Smut, Older Man/Younger Woman, One Night Stands, Present Tense, Priorities, Rare Fandoms, References to Shakespeare, Scrapbooks, Secrets, Sex Drugs and Rock and Roll, Speak Now Or Forever Hold Your Peace, The 1970s, The Rolling Stones - Freeform, Tropes, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings, We were young once, Youth, classic rock references, miraculous plot resolution, plot holes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-27
Updated: 2015-03-27
Packaged: 2018-03-19 20:43:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3623676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/ProtoNeoRomantic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something happened on Saturday, March 20, 1971.  But if Ed is the one who remembered it in the first place, how is it that it happened to someone else?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Clive

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gilescandy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gilescandy/gifts).



For Clive, it's a choice. Between loosing his senses and keeping his cool. Much as his blood is screaming at him to do something macho, to ram this idiot's excuses and apologies down his throat, that isn't what Lauren and Emma need from him. His pride is not the issue. This is the difference, he reminds himself forcefully, between being 'macho' and being a man. A man is calm in a crisis. Sensible.

The humor helps. The irony. The distance. “I was only out of the room for a minute,” he says (in the moment that might have been a shocked silence otherwise) while he tries to think of anything he can do that will help at all in any sense. “At least it means we'll have something in common now,” he answers rather than correcting Ed's assumption that he and Emma won't have met in 1971. It's irrelevant. She wasn't his wife then. He didn't own her, as she had been fond of pointing out. He hadn't even had the chance to rescue her yet then, to sweep her off her feet and make everything better as he wants to do right now.

When at last she opens the bathroom door, it's the end of joking. He'd toss her a lifeline if he could, but he can't toss off another oneliner. Calm and sensible may still be the order of the day, but it is getting harder. His wife and daughter are in terrible pain. Pain they never would have been in if Emma hadn't gone out and drunk herself senseless and gone home with Ed. Pain Ed doesn't seem to be taking into account in his off-handed, no-thought-required answer that he and Lauren will certainly not be splitting up. In fact, Ed honestly seems shocked when Lauren does not immediately agree. Shocked, and (Clive is forced to admit) in pain.

Paradoxically that doesn't help with Clive's temper. “They're vermin, Emma! Vermin!” he shouts of her beloved badgers, when she has the nerve to say something about his scrapbooking. But the next moment he is calm again. There _is_ something he can do. Clive sets to work. Scrapbook Man to the rescue!

When the truth is revealed, the release of tension is almost physical, for the two women anyway. Lauren is overjoyed, giggly. “Oh, my clever Clive!” Emma fairly gasps, “I'll never criticize your scrapbooks ever again.” Clive wants to feel the same sense of relief, and yet his temper remains tightly coiled beneath his calm, sensible exterior. There's a knot in his stomach, as if this trap might swing shut on him yet. A male instinct he supposes, reluctant to let ones guard down once alerted.

Ed too seems to be having trouble letting it go. “You definitely got up on stage?” he asks Emma one last time. Still puzzled, still concerned.

“I wasn't the only one,” Emma reassures him, and suddenly thoughtlessly, she is gushing about Mick Jagger again. As if this is what her husband needs to hear right now. As if—a new thought grabs a hold of Clive and, mad as it is, it latched on tight. There must be a million men named Mick or Nick in England, but none that Emma is so clearly taken with. There's a picture of his ugly, talentless face in the scrapbook, right next to the faded ticket. Unable to control himself any longer, rashly, senselessly, Clive crumples the cherished forty-year-old souvenir photograph into a tight ball in his fist.

It's too much. He can't behave this way, can't feel this way in front of Ed, not right now. Clive hurries from the room. Emma follows. She is not embarrassed by his behavior, not angry about the keepsake. She is concerned. Solicitous. Nick or Mick doesn't matter to her. Not Jagger or the other one. “I'm sorry I've upset you,” she says, when they are behind closed doors. Clive folds her in his arms, and it is 1971 all over again. It doesn't matter where she's been, that weekend or any other weekend back then. She's here now, with him, and her love is all he needs.

 


	2. Lauren

For Lauren, it's a choice. Between the horror of knowing for certain what she doesn't want to know is true and the slim hope of finding out that really, after all, it isn't. At first she's totally convinced. Ed is quite convincing. She doesn't know how to react properly. She can't think straight, can't do basic maths. She's asked her ridiculous question before she sees how ridiculous it is. Ed must think that she's mad as a bag of cats. She knows that that's how she's acting, but she can't help it. Of course, Ed is not her father, couldn't possibly be. But that doesn't dent the shock of realizing that he and her mother have 'almost certainly' done everything it would take for him to be. The mere possibility is killing her. She knows she doesn't want to know for sure, she wouldn't be able to stand it. “The only thing I want out in the open are your hands,” she says, and goes on babbling more nonsense. Poor Ed doesn't deserve her anger, but she just can't help it. Especially since he's all but accused her of lying about her age; but then, given what she's just asked him, is that surprising? Of course he has to ask, poor Ed. Dear God! She's just had to assure her boyfriend that she is nearly a decade _too young_ to be his daughter. How old are Ed's children, she suddenly wonders. His _grandson_ is almost twenty. She can't stay here in this tiny, suffocating little room a moment longer, can't keep thinking about this. “Shift it! Shift it! Shift it!” she barks at him. Poor Ed.

Mad, yes, mad is what it is, to keep probing and poking, trying to find out exactly what she doesn't what to know. Oh, no! No. Wrong-wrong-wrong-wong-wrong associations! Ed is not-not-not in any way related to her, whatever he may have done with her mother. She should just let it go. Just let it be. At this point 'doesn't remember' is as much as they can hope for. And though it feels nothing, NOTHING like being 'in the clear', Lauren knows she ought to quit while she's behind and not make matters any worse.

But Mum is as drunk now as she must have been then, and the way she is talking to Ed! Comparing him, favorably, to her husband! No amount of drink can excuse that. The _second_ time she calls him 'Lovely Ed' is bad enough. The way his discomfort with her spikes, as though he has some memory of her calling him that before. Which he probably does. Probably in bed. He _does_ remember details, he just doesn't want to say so, that's all. Hell! This must be what it is like to be actually, physically, for all eternity in hell! But none of that prepares Lauren for the over-the-line, unimaginably what-the-fuck comment that comes out of her mother's mouth as she gazes at Ed's hair with a look that says she'd have tried to put her hands in it already if there was no one else here. “Like the fur of a sexy badger.” That's it! No human woman could tolerate that!

Out in the open. There it is. Out in the open. Exactly where no one needs or want it to be. Mum's horrified expression, her strangled squeals and gasps, make Lauren acutely sorry. When Mum runs and locks herself in the bathroom, Lauren is beside herself. Even though she honestly knows better, she can't help imagining that she's gone in there to slit her wrists or something. The thought frightens her so badly that her terror comes boiling out of her as ugly, petulant anger again. She bangs on the door, saying hurtful things, using words as a mere tool to express the same anxiety felt by a wailing infant demanding that Mum come back where she can be seen and prove she hasn't popped out of existence.

When she comes out, it doesn't get any better. Mum remembers it the way Ed remembers it, at least, what she admits to remembering. Lauren doesn't believe this blackout bullshit. Nobody gets that drunk. She'd remember bits of it, wouldn't she? Ed does, Lauren is sure of it. He remembers bits, her mum's bits, the naughty ones! And she does his too.

And then, suddenly, again, thanks to Mum, that other thing is out in the open too, the thing Lauren hasn't even let herself think yet. Bouncing on the balls of her feet like a fidgety fourteen-year-old, still drunk, Mum asks, “Oh, will you have to split up now?”

Lauren is as shocked by Ed's immediate, “no” as he is by her “I don't know.” And suddenly she is on the defensive, trying to justify herself, which isn't fair. She hasn't done anything. It's not as though she's proved she loves him less than he loves her. It just isn't _his_ bloody Mum!

It gets worse. Mum twists the knife, holding out false hope. “Hold on! Hold on, my ticket!” she exclaims, explaining that 'whoever he was' (whoever Ed bloody _remembers_ being) wrote his name and number on the back of her gig ticket. Then she has the nerve to get snippy when Lauren asks her if she still has the ticket! If she doesn't have the bloody thing, why bring it up!?! It all sexy badgers. It's too much, and Lauren is about to say so. Maybe in some not so nice language.

But then there is Dad, wonderful Dad, being so calm and sturdy that she thinks somehow, even this, he might get sorted. Of course, he'll have the ticket. He'll have put it in a scrapbook. For a moment, Lauren feels better, calmer, like everything is going to be alright after all. Then reality hits her. Everyone else goes up to the loft to get the scrapbooks. Lauren lets them go. She can't stand pretending with them. That scrapbook can't change the truth. It can only prove it. They've just gone to get irrefutable, undeniable proof of what Mum and Ed both already clearly remember. The two of them have had sex.

Panicked, Lauren grabs her phone to call Debs. But Debs is no help. Debs is worried about Debs. It doesn't matter. She doesn't want Debs. The only three people she has ever wanted to lean on, the people who normally make her feel safest, most loved, are the ones who are here now. The ones whose delusional pursuit of an alternative history she can't deal with. The ones who've all slept with one another.

Three people. One of whom is Ed. Ed who is there to lean on, no matter how crazy she is acting. Ed in whom she trusts. She's never felt this way about any of her other boyfriends, Lauren realizes. Like what they have is not just a romance but an honest to God partnership, maybe even a family. Most of the rest of them would have probably just left by now, but Ed is still here. He is sitting there, with her parents, sleeves rolled up, doing his best to help. Suddenly, his immediate 'no' to her mother's question makes perfect, beautiful sense. Ed loves Lauren. Really, really loves her. Which is a damn good thing, because Lauren is just realizing how very much she loves Ed.

Inevitably, the artifact is found. No memento can escape the mad scrapbooker. The plastic has already been pulled back. Mum is reaching for it. Suddenly, Lauren has made her choice, has slammed her hand down over the offending piece of evidence. “I don't want to know.” Ed has done nothing wrong. Technically, Mum has done nothing wrong. Except for getting drunk tonight and talking about sexy badgers. Ed and Lauren are doing nothing wrong. Nothing they mean to stop doing. The relief of that realization makes the nonetheless ugliness of what has happen between the four of them over the last forty years and change just about bearable. Ed will be there to help her bear it.

Then Mum ruins everything again. “That's sweet,” she says, “but I still need to know.” Lauren doesn't know what to say. It's too late to protest. Dad already has the ticket. He's looking. _Bloody say it already, Dad! No one cares that there's a phone number._ The stupid, stupid hope that Lauren can't help feeling is killing her.

“...It looks like Nick, or Mick....?” Nothing Dad says matters after that. Lauren is shocked, giddy. She and Ed might be the only two people in the room, the only two people in the world. A great gulf closes between them. He is only hers. Her lovely, lovely Ed. It's as if she's lost him and he's just come back to her. He teases her about saying it 'didn't matter', as if any one of the four of them had ever, ever believed that. As if they could possibly want to go back to not knowing this wonderful news.

Lauren barely notices Mum and Dad's silly tiff about Mick Jagger. They're like that. They'll get over it. Little things like that don't matter when you really love someone.


	3. Ed

For Ed, it's a choice. Between confusion and relief. Something about the math here doesn't add up, or adds up too well. It's his memories that started all this in the first place. The memories are there, real, solid. Memories of quick, drunken, highly adequate sex after the Stone's gig in 1971. Sex with a blonde girl. One he'd thought was very fun and rather lovely, if a bit odd. A girl with unkind things to say about horses, despite her favorite song.

And here is Emma, fitting that description. Admitting to a similar memory. So where's the logic in the thought that the memory might have actually happened to someone else?

When asked, he honestly can't remember writing his name and number on the back of her ticket. He tries, reaches back with his mind, but he honestly can't. He can't remember, but that doesn't mean he didn't. He'd have given her his number, no doubt. It's always polite to pretend that a one night stand isn't. But why _would_ he remember, after all these years, what he'd written it on? It's important now; it wasn't then.

Still, everyone seems encouraged to have finally hit on one verifiable detail. Verifiable and potentially inconsistent. Something he doesn't remember and she does. Could they really each be remembering someone else? Ed grabs one of Clive's scrapbooks and starts looking through it hopefully, desperately. He wants to help, wants to believe, wants to make it right.

Lauren won't even look at him. At any of them. She has fled to the other end of the room and is whispering, or rather squeaking into her mobile phone, making high pitched (and from his location, unintelligible) noises of distress. Dear God, she's _telling_ people! Not _people_ he realizes; give her more credit than that. Her sister. Debs. Because she needs someone to lean on. And she doesn't know if it can be him anymore or not.

Ed doesn't let himself think about that. He keeps his attention on the scrapbook in front of him. Three people sit around the table quickly leafing through volumes, hoping the one answer to everything that matters right now will leap out at them from the pages at this most needful moment. In the quiet of the searching, a thought intrudes upon Ed's mind. How old _is_ Debs? Has he ever been told? She reminds him so much of his mother. _No. There is no time for that. Focus on the scrapbook._

Ed searches as if the fate of the world depends upon what he might find. In a way, it really does. _Will you have to split up now? Don't know._ This could be the end of his world with Lauren. He can't imagine... and he can't not imagine. It's not fair, he's only just found her. After all these years of misery and telling himself that in real life 'love' is what he's had with Lydia, always hard, never grand, no more than a tense set of barely adequate working compromises. No it bloody well isn't! _This_ is love _._ And if she isn't Helen of Troy, if he isn't Paris, if no one's cities are in danger of burning to the ground, no towers falling to mark the end of their little world; it doesn't feel any different.

Clive finds what they've been looking for. Lauren returns. Calmer, after talking to Debs. Calmer and something else. He looks into her eyes and knows. It's not the end of the the world, not the end of their world. She says as much. No matter what is written on that scrap of paper, the woman he loves is coming home with him. Paris was never happier to hear it.

Ed braces himself for the inevitable shock. He grasps Lauren's hand, prepared to comfort her. There is only one answer that makes any sense. It can't have been someone else. He is the one who remembered it in the first place. All they will have done is found the proof. Then it's off to rock in a corner for a few weeks. Or to worry over Lauren while she does anyway. He's got to help her keep her head straight, make sure she doesn't say more than she means to out of grief and regret it later. Make sure Lydia doesn't find out. Debs won't have told Keith, will she? He is stupid enough to tell Tim.

But incredibly, the name on the ticket is _not_ Ed nor Eddie as he half remembers her calling him, gushing about his eyes and his smile. _Lovely Eddie, let me see those dimples again. I could drown in those eyes._ Except it wasn't her. She was with Mick or Nick or whoever whilst he was apparently shagging some other blonde girl who hated horses and called men 'lovely'.

For a moment, Ed is deeply relieved, as relieved as Lauren and her mum. He wants to stay relieved, to take this miracle at face value, to not look a gift horse (however brutish) in the mouth. But he can't let go of his confusion, not quite yet. Something about the math here doesn't add up, or adds up too well. It's his memories that started all this in the first place. The memories are there, real, solid. “You definitely got up on stage?” he can't help but ask. He doesn't _want_ it to be her. And he did fail to recognize her in that photograph, though he had only looked at it for a moment. But still, what he remembers matches what he sees as well as it is likely to after so many years. That most of those memories are touch, taste, smell, sound doesn't help matters any. He'd like to ask her if she'd used to smoke. _“Well why don't you kiss_ me _too then?” with a wink and a smile, “I'm jealous.”_ The girl he remembers tastes of cigarettes.

“Yes,” Emma answers him here and now, “although, now I think about it, I wasn't the only one. Mick loved the ladies.” Relief. Relief wins out at last. Ed surrenders to it and confusion is banished. Even, the awkwardness of Clive releasing his temper and hurrying from the room in embarrassment can't spoil this moment. As Emma trots off after him, Ed and Lauren discretely let themselves out.

When they get home, there is no awkwardness. No rocking in a corner. They make love with passionate abandon. They put Lovely Eddie and Blonde Whatshername to shame. Probably Emma and Nick/Mick too. But they needn't think of that. They hold each other a long while afterward, feeling contented. Joyful. In Love.


	4. Emma

For Emma, it isn't a choice. Not when she sees the anguished looks that pass between Ed and Lauren as his “no” and her “I don't know” fight to suck the same air from the already too nearly unbreathable atmosphere. It'd be an over statement to say the revelation 'sobers' her. But something has to be done. Any fool can see that. Lauren is drowning and Clive isn't doing much better, whatever he pretends. Ed and especially Lauren seem to have missed that this is happening to Clive as much as to any of the rest of them. Up to now, Emma has missed it too. Running off and hiding in the bathroom! She's ashamed of herself.

There must be a way to fix this. There must be a way to make Clive feel that he's helped with the fixing. He needs that. If only the past could be changed by keeping scrapbooks. “Hold on! Hold on!” The revelation strikes Emma suddenly and she is genuinely excited by it. “My ticket!”

It's a bit awkward, however, letting Clive be the one to come to the rescue. When Emma professes not to know where the ticket can be found, Lauren is fit to be tied. Well and no wonder. She hasn't thought this out. Emma really has had quite a lot too much to drink. Maybe not quite as much as that night. She doubts she could successfully convince anyone tomorrow that she doesn't remember tonight. It doesn't matter. Clive speaks up, offering the solution, and everyone lets the incongruity pass.

Emma tries not to watch Ed as they look through the scrapbooks. She has trouble for several reasons. One, he really is lovely and she really is drunk. Two, she keeps trying to catch a glimpse of what she almost can't help thinking of as the _other_ Ed, to make two separate sets of memories coalesce into one person. She can't quite, and maybe that's for the best. Best not dwell on any other reasons. All highly improbable. Just stop looking at him.

At last Clive has found the ticket. Emma is grateful to God that it is Clive who finds it. She could not have arranged for that. One scrapbook looks like another as far as Emma is concerned.

Emma can feel her heart thumping as Clive peels back the plastic and Lauren comes to sit at the table, clinging to Ed's hand. It's almost happened now. It's almost over. This is going to work.

But there is one last snag, one last hurdle. Lauren slams her hand down on the scrap book, on the ticket, explaining that she doesn't want to know, that she loves Ed regardless. Which is true, and rather the point. But in the state Emma is in, it still annoys her a little. Lauren has always been strong willed, difficult, like Clive. She is her father's daughter.

“That's sweet, but I still need to know,” Emma insists. What else can she say? Lauren is flabbergasted, but she'll be cured of that at any moment.

Bizarrely, frustratingly, Clive takes his time trying to make the writing out, starting in entirely the wrong place. Nobody cares about the bloody phone number. At last, at last, he says it. “...and a name, looks like Nick or Mick...” Emma is quite as relieved as if she had been in any doubt. She is so happy to see Lauren happy again.

When Ed almost ruins it by asking yet more questions, Emma almost wishes she had something to hit him with. Still, she plays it rather cool if she does say so herself, especially considering that she is still at least half drunk. He always did ask too many questions. And now, to a certain extent, memories really do start to merge, to integrate into a single person. Emma rather wishes they wouldn't. She becomes nervous, babbling on about Mick Jagger until Clive gets upset again. She follows him from the room and by the time he has calmed down, Ed and Lauren are gone. That's probably best. Emma and Clive go upstairs and get ready for bed.

Most nights they roll on their sides for comfort, each facing the nearer wall. Tonight they hold each other. For comfort. Nothing is said about 1971. Nothing is said about 1972. This is love. This matters. This is important. And like it or not Ed and Lauren matter. Ed and Lauren are important.

Emma and Ed might have mattered once, for a moment. But then it was over. Drunk as they both were, she honestly didn't know if he'd come and gone without even remembering to leave her a phone number, or if she'd just lost it somewhere. She'd thought the next morning what a shame it was he hadn't been the one to write on the back of her gig ticket, instead of that silly bloke Nick who'd been buying her drinks like that was going to get him somewhere. For the first time in over forty years, Emma tries to picture Nick's face. She can't. He didn't matter.

Truthfully, as Emma lies in the dark with her husband, who loves her, who loved her even then; she knows what happened with Ed does matter. Sex always matters. But compared to Ed and Lauren, it doesn't matter. Compare to Emma and Clive, it doesn't matter. The way Ed and Lauren behaved tonight, the way they were there for each other, the way they couldn't stand the thought of splitting up... As the great poets have said: Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds. No, it is an ever fixed mark. Otherwise, it's only rock-n-roll.


End file.
